Mr. Chairman, we appreciate the invitation of the committee to appear today.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is Canada's largest taxpayer advocacy group, with over 70,000 supporters from coast to coast, and 22 years of history advocating for less government, lower taxes, and more accountability from our elected officials.
We welcome the reforms contained in Bill C-45 as they apply to public sector pensions. We believe that increasing the retirement age for new hires to 65 is a good first step toward making government employee pensions at the federal level more sustainable. We salute members of all parties for taking leadership by reforming their own pensions and speeding that legislation to royal assent. It was a long multi-decade slog for us, and you folks managed to get the job done in 48 hours when the chips were down. That was inspiring to watch.
With regard to pensions, if you look at C.D. Howe Institute's estimates and the public accounts, you see that unlike the Canada pension plan, the government employees' pensions are completely funded out of general revenues. There are no pension funds set aside to secure the retirements of Canada's federal government employees. We believe that Parliament needs to have a serious look at this.
The government was able to put the Canada pension plan on a sustainable basis. Through reforms to old age security, by raising the retirement age to 67, and by giving people an incentive to stay in the workforce until age 70, you're also putting old age security benefits on a more sustainable basis. We think you need to look at this for government employees.
With regard to EI, we have a lot of sympathy for the arguments made by the Canadian Labour Congress. They rightfully feel that to have $57 billion of employment insurance funds snafued by government in order to apply them to deficit reduction is a shocking and upsetting development. The seizing of these notional pension surpluses in the 1990s falls under the same banner. We think that parliamentarians, people with their feet on the ground who have to go home on the weekend and explain all of this to their constituents, need to be very wary of actuarial assumptions and projections, notional surpluses, and these deficits that arise. When you move away from having individuals save for their own retirements, innocent people are subject to the manipulations of government and the financial system, and it doesn't serve anyone.
With regard to the EI funding, we note that for every employee up to the average industrial wage, employers and employees who are fully in the system pay over $2,000 combined into the EI fund each year. Many people will never claim against the EI fund, and yet you have entire regions of the country where people are multiple claimants, claiming more than three times in the last five years. It's particularly unfair in the Ontario labour market, where it's very difficult for most people who are working to even qualify for EI. We ask why you don't set up a plan similar to the Canada pension plan, where employees and employers contribute to a rainy day fund that individual workers can access directly.
Thank you.